The Afghan

The afghan that my mother made me
Is made of many other fingers’ doings, too;
Is made of fibers from all corners of the world
All in shades of grey,
Just like our name –

But none are dearer than the swatches
Of cream and mouse colored wool
Shorn from sheep that summered
Up the hill from my childhood home.

Nothing is sweeter than lying
Under the knots and twists
Of love’s work,

Than hearing the bleat
Of familiar sheep in the
Opening meadows of one’s dreams.

One Woman's Blues

I got that one man medicine blues
If one man ain’t there, I’ll find another that do
I got a feeling in my bones that I gotta find something new
I got that one man can’t heal mine
I’ll find another kind of blues.

I've got day on the horizon, think it’s about time I run
I’ll tell you goodbye tomorrow when I stand in another sun
What you’ve got will never hold me cause I might not ever come
I gotta pack up all my bags, babe,
Cause I’m not your only one.

I got that devil in my pocket but he ain’t no kinda fun
Devil sends me running to another mother’s son
I’ve had so many babies but I don’t quite think I’m done
I gotta heal myself with one man
Cause I got hurt by another one.

I got that one man medicine blues
If one man ain’t right, I’ll find another that'll do
I got a feeling in my bones that I gotta find something new
I got that one man can’t heal mine
I’ll find another kind of blues.

Poem to Snowy Afternoon

The lonely tethered along:
I wear my balloon face
And this city bears time and place,
A dumb Mother Hubbard hugging
Her children all to the brutal banks
Of her thighs.

I am foggy color and shape,
See myself incessant in windows
As a ghost imposed on the bright wares inside,
Ever turning the dishes of my spectral eyes aside.

I try to ply the street with this pale version,
But blood beats me to it:
No face in the glass is ever mine
As long as its double remains
Echoed in crude blooms of flesh and bone.

There are no frozen dancing
Pieces of the clouds that light
On my cheeks without dying.
I am still a sack of hair, woolen damp
Stuck with bits of sky,
Melting fervent words
Silent back into my brain.

Biological

I’m afraid it’s biological.
Because there is no way to explain
Why I shut the door before
Burying my greedy nose
In the collars of his clothes,

And why, when I smell his skull,
The urgent advice of my reptile brain
Is to pull his bad old body closer
And make babies.

The heart,
The heart is nothing.
Hack it out, you’re good
And dead.

It’s harder to sort cell by cell,
To quell every little fire
To tell every little pair of hands
To obey, to behave
And go about your business
As if you weren’t enslaved by them

As if you weren’t simply
The descendant of some mad impulse
Encoded by the same passions of
Every other fool that came before.